Author: Editor

University of Illinois men’s basketball coach Bruce Weber is under fire. The Illinois coach with a record of 209-96, two Big Ten titles and one trip to the NCAA national championship game, is under intense scrutiny from local and national media concerning the direction his program is headed.

Weber has a losing record in Big Ten play since the 2006 season, the year after former coach Bill Self’s players departed. Fans have criticized him for years and with a new athletic director and a season rapidly spinning out of control, this likely is Weber’s last season as Illinois men’s basketball coach.

Two announcements from GateHouse Media draw attention to the newest trend used by media corporations to cut costs and consolidate production. On Jan. 18 the Illinois Times, an online newspaper covering Springfield, Ill., reported about staff reductions at the Springfield Journal-Register. (story) To cut costs, the story reported the Journal-Register would lay off up to a dozen copy editors and page designers over the course of the summer, and that the Journal-Register would send its copy to a central publishing desk outside of Springfield.

On Feb. 8 the Rockford Register Star announced that Rockford would hire 60 or more staff to work the new central desk to be housed in Rockford. All GateHouse Media newspapers with circulations more than 5,000 will be sent to the hub in Rockford. Newspapers with circulations of less than 5,000 will be sent to a hub in Framingham, Mass.

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Gateway Journalism Review is looking for people to analyze their local media.

Notice how we’re avoiding the traditional terms for this position. We don’t really want ombudsmen because that doesn’t really define what we need. The same can be said of news councils. Truth vigilantes don’t fill our needs either.

Media like their subjects to be easy: their heroes to be heroes, their villains to be villains.

Celebrities are wonderful, until they do something that proves they aren’t wonderful. Stories must be framed to make it easy for readers to understand what really is happening.

And then a story like that of Joe Paterno comes along and it makes media’s job so much more difficult. For 50 years, Paterno was the ideal of college football coaches. His 409 wins were the most of any Division I football coach. He graduated 80 percent of his students. He gave money back to his school. He was easily framed as the granddad of college football — until last fall when news about Jerry Sandusky broke. Sandusky, the former Paterno assisted is currently charged with over 40 counts of sexual abuse with boys under the age of 15. Another Paterno assistant, Mike McQueary told Paterno that he saw Sandusky raping a young boy. Paterno notified his superiors but never approached Sandusky or the police about the incident. Paterno could have done more than just report his knowledge of Sandusky’s misdeeds. He should have helped those kids.

America’s true political center can be found by examining the state of Kansas, Salt Lake County, Utah, and NASCAR fans.

Many liberals may have just blanched at that thought, but this is the argument Tim Groseclose makes in “Left Turn: How Media Bias Distorts the American Mind.” Groseclose argues that a liberal media bias distorts the average American’s political viewpoint and tilts the political field to the left. He also claims conservative news organizations such as Fox News actually present a centrist point of view.